The Tied Man

Now it was Blaine’s turn to take charge of the proceedings.  This was, after all, her business.  The introductions were completed and she ushered us to the table.  I sat on Royce’s left; Finn, as brittle as deadwood, took the seat next to Selena – much to her obvious delight – and our hostess went to the head of the table.

‘Selena, darling, you look absolutely stunning.  Such an unusual dress,’ she said as she took her seat.

I watched with morbid fascination as yet one more supposedly intelligent adult melted under Blaine’s polished brand of bullshit flattery.

‘This?  Oh, it’s from  a little boutique in LA.  Roycie had it designed for me when we were over there last autumn.  He was picking up some award or other for his ‘Sex Lives of the Emperors’ doc.’  She had a piercing voice that needed conscious modulation to stop it becoming glass-breakingly shrill.  Somewhere down the line, daddy had paid for hours of elocution lessons to get his little darling a few more steps up the social ladder.

‘What do you think, Lilith?’  Blaine asked me.

I already wanted to strangle Selena simply for shortening the perfectly adequate word, ‘documentary’, but that was beside the point;  I was merely expected to contribute to this nauseating farce and try not to outshine the birthday girl.  My task wasn’t made any easier by her choice of outfit.  She wore a cantilevered , augmented-breast-skimming satin dress the colour of egg-yolk.  Somewhere in deepest Nebraska, a prom queen two sizes smaller than Selena was wondering where the fuck her outfit had disappeared to.  She wore her honey-toned hair piled high on her head, and even in candlelight I could see the hidden welds of hair-extensions.

Underneath the thin veneer of ostentatious glamour she looked absolutely appalling, but ‘What do you think, Lilith?’  was nothing to do with complimenting Selena, and everything to do with Blaine testing the extent of my compliance.

Finn

I waited for Lilith’s barbed rejoinder – for her to point out that Selena looked like she’d been fed into sausage-casing to fit into that dress, or that yellow was a poor choice of colour for someone whose skin-tone could best be described as ‘tangerine’.

It never came.

‘Very striking.’ Lilith gave a thin smile, and I wanted to howl at her; to take every piece of crystal and silver and heirloom china that adorned the table and hurl it to the floor before shaking her until reason returned.  Instead I took refuge in silence and prayed for the temazepam to start killing my senses.

From her cowed, false words to her choice of outfit, the message couldn’t have been clearer: for whatever price, Lilith Bresson had finally been bought.

Lilith

Henry, professionally invisible, cleared away the dishes that contained the dying slush of a champagne sorbet amuse-bouche.  I had come to adore Henry’s food, but in this instance I could have been eating cardboard as I obsessively scrutinized our guests.  Royce had eaten like a rooting truffle-pig, and if I had been in the least hungry to start with, the eager snuffling sounds he made as he spooned the stuff into his already over-moist mouth would have killed my appetite for the next month or so.

Selena had that infuriating habit of ostentatious dieters that involved her sampling two mouthfuls before deliberately pushing the rest around the bowl to show that she would not be ingesting those remaining five calories, and I let my initial dislike bloom into unfettered, if well-hidden, hatred.

Finn had simply pushed his dish to one side the moment it arrived.

‘Do you mind if we…?’ Royce asked, and placed a tiny silver filigreed snuffbox on the table before fumbling in his top pocket and bringing out a matching miniature spoon.  ‘Wouldn’t normally and all that, but it’s been rather a long day, what with all the travel.  Would hate to be asleep before the, er… main course, so to speak.’

Blaine gave her mellifluous laugh.  ‘Royce, as I explained when you booked – once you’re at Albermarle, you don’t need an excuse for anything.  If you’d have requested it, I would have supplied my own.’

‘Ah.  Marvellous.  Lilith, would you care to…?’

I wondered if we would be playing ‘guess the rest of the sentence’ for the remainder of the evening.

‘No, thank you.’  The refusal came harder than I intended, and he gave an oddly childish pout.

‘Goodness.  I didn’t take you for a puritan in such things.’

Blaine glanced at me and I knew I had been reined in.  I forced an apologetic smile. ‘Don’t get me wrong – under normal circumstances, I’d be more than happy to join you.  But I’m at a rather tricky stage with Blaine’s portrait.  Morning-after juddering wouldn’t be a good idea right now.’